


Stamped in the Mint of Memory

by inexplicifics



Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [9]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study, F/M, Families of Choice, Friends to Lovers, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Kaer Morhen's Fanon Hot Springs (The Witcher), Original Character Death(s), Sister-Sister Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-25
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:28:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24375061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inexplicifics/pseuds/inexplicifics
Summary: Zofia had a sister, once.The White Wolf gave Zofia vengeance. It's up to her to heal.
Relationships: Auckes (The Witcher)/Original Female Character
Series: The Accidental Warlord and His Pack [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683661
Comments: 382
Kudos: 3321
Collections: Good Relationship Etiquette (familial included) - or Good BDSM Etiquette - or Good Relationship and BDSM Etiquette, Notes From The Path





	Stamped in the Mint of Memory

Zofia had a sister, once.

Well, Zofia has many siblings; she is the eldest, but her mother bears a child a year for eight long, bloody years, and five of them live long enough to be named, before the ninth dies aborning and takes their mother with him.

Her father marries again almost before the grave is dug, and his second wife bears him a daughter before the year was out, and puts the infant girl into Zofia’s hands, and swears she’ll bear a son next time to prove her worth. Zofia is ten years old, and she names the baby Anna, and all the love that Anna’s mother never gives her pours out of Zofia’s heart like ale from a bottomless keg.

Anna lives, which is something of a surprise to everyone but Zofia; lives, and thrives, and by the time she is five, it is already clear that she is going to be beautiful. Zofia, who was never even pretty - who is as tall and broad-shouldered as the miller’s son, and can take the blacksmith’s apprentice two falls out of three when they wrestle - does her best. She’s never been much good at sewing - can manage a straight seam or patch a hole, nothing more complicated - but she chops all the wood the widow down the lane needs for the entire winter, and the widow sews pretty clothes for Anna, and Zofia calls it a fair trade. She barters rabbit furs for lessons in braiding from the acknowledged beauty of the town, because her _own_ hair, plain and brown and straight, can be hacked off just below her ears and be just fine, but Anna’s lovely blonde hair grows out in waves like ripples on the river, and Zofia can’t bear to cut it, so she has to find some way to keep it tamed. She spends six months hauling water for the village herbalist in return for lessons on salves and balms and hair rinses, because _Zofia_ doesn’t mind callused hands and occasional scars and scrubbing her hair with the same harsh soap she used for everything else, but Anna has soft little hands and tender skin and lovely hair like sunlight on the water, and Zofia can’t bear to see that change.

Anna grows up lovely, and beloved, and she loves Zofia in turn with all the adoration of a child’s heart. She can’t haul water or cut wood, but she begs lessons from the widow down the lane and by the time she is eight, she is making all her own clothes, and Zofia’s too, and embroidering them with clumsy little flowers along the hems, that grow less and less clumsy as the years roll by: daisies and pansies and forget-me-nots. Anna can’t spend long hours in the fields, her soft hands too tender for the endless labor of plowing and sowing and weeding and more weeding and harvesting and plowing again, but she takes over the tiny vegetable garden and makes it flourish, and somehow Zofia’s favorite herbs end up being the ones that grow the best. Anna can’t bear to take part in the yearly slaughter of pigs and cows and anything else that will be more useful eaten than eating over the cold months, but she learns to cook instead, and to cook _well_.

Anna is, Zofia knows, going to end up married to some very lucky man, maybe even the town alderman or a minor noble of some sort, and she will spend the rest of her days in something as close to luxury as any peasant girl could ever hope for. But the third daughter of a peasant - even a relatively wealthy one - hasn’t much of a dowry, and so when Anna is twelve and Zofia is twenty-two, Zofia kisses her on the forehead and promises to come home every winter, and goes off and signs up with the mercenary company that has set up a recruiting booth in the town square.

She saves every copperbit she can. No drinking sprees for her; no whores. She pays as well as she needs to for good armor and well-made weaponry, because she’ll be no good to Anna _dead_ , and she learns every trick she can from anyone who even looks _competent_ , and she gets _good_. Solid, steady, _reliable_ Zofia, calm in battle and off the field alike, dangerous as a mother bear with a sword in her hand; she rises in the ranks faster than she’d expected, and the little pouches of coin she sends home to Anna are heavier with every passing year.

She comes home every winter, just as she’d promised, and every winter Anna is taller and lovelier and sweeter, and every year when Zofia sees her sister waiting for her, she swears _again_ , silently, that she will do anything, anything at all, to see Anna given the life of peace and luxury she deserved.

By the time Anna is sixteen, Zofia is an under-captain, and Anna’s dowry is the best in their village and the three villages surrounding it, and better than half the dowries in the big town a day’s ride away. Anna is the prettiest girl in three villages and half a town, too, lovely as midsummer, sweet as honey, a skilled seamstress and a marvelous cook and proud owner of the finest garden in town. She’s had four marriage proposals already.

Zofia goes away in the spring, kissing her sister on the forehead and promising to return at the end of autumn, the same way she always does. She goes away whistling, content in the world and everything it contains.

*

When she comes back, the garden is dead, and the meals are burnt, and Anna is gone.

It takes Zofia a week and several vicious threats to get the story out of _anyone_. Eventually she manages to intimidate the miller’s son, who had been one of Anna’s most ardent suitors, into talking. Into _weeping_.

The king had come through on his progress, and Anna had been at the market; and of course, of _course_ the sunlight caught on Anna’s golden hair.

Zofia knows what sort of man the king of Kaedwen is. A mercenary hears a great many stories, and none of them are good.

Zofia goes to the town huntsman, and puts a pouch of gold upon his table - the gold that should have been Anna’s dowry, should have paid for life and luxury and _joy_ \- and demands his aid. The huntsman quails when she tells him what she needs, but the lure of gold is stronger than fear; that’s something any mercenary learns. He takes his dogs and he leads the way out into the forest, to the clearing where the king’s progress made their camp three months ago, and he tells his dogs to search, and they do.

It takes three days, in the end, and Zofia does not sleep or eat.

Anna’s grave is deep enough that nothing has disturbed it. She is wrapped in the torn rags of a dress she made with her own soft hands, and Zofia does not look beneath the cloth. She does not want to know what Anna suffered ere she died.

She pours the gold that should have been her sister’s dowry at the huntsman’s feet, and cuts a lock of Anna’s golden hair, and tucks it into the empty pouch: gold for gold is fair exchange. She re-fills the grave, and gathers stones, and makes for her sister a cairn that will last a hundred winters.

She leaves the village, never to return.

*

Zofia cannot kill the king of Kaedwen; a peasant girl turned mercenary could never hope to find herself within sword’s reach of a king. She goes back to her mercenary troop, and she fights, and she is paid. She drinks her pay, as she never did before, drinks herself deaf and dumb and blind so that she can fall asleep without seeing Anna’s rag-wrapped body printed upon the backs of her eyelids, a memory far worse than any nightmare could hope to be. She has always been calm, but now she is _cold_ , and the warriors who answer to her in battle do not offer friendship off the field.

Zofia is twenty-nine (and Anna is seventeen and will never grow older) when the word comes through Kaedwen like a winter storm: the king is dead. The king is _slain_. The White Wolf of the mountains came down from Kaer Morhen at the head of an army of Witchers and took the king of Kaedwen’s head in front of the gates of Ard Carraigh, and proclaimed that he did so because the king was a monster, as foul as any other that Witchers ever slew.

Zofia looks at the bitter mug of strong, foul wine in front of her - the best this piss-poor tavern has to offer - and shoves it away, and stands. She goes to her captain, and tells him she is leaving, and he looks at the expression on her face and flinches, just a little, and does not argue, though she is one of his finest warriors by now. She packs her bags: armor, weapons, clothing, and a little pouch containing nothing but a lock of golden hair.

She heads north, and east, and north again.

The Trail to Kaer Morhen is steep and treacherous, and Zofia climbs it slowly, testing every patch of stone before she sets her weight upon it. She still nearly falls three times - the third, she catches herself on a spindly little thorn-tree, and hangs there for a moment looking down and down and _down_ into a gorge so deep it seems to have no bottom. She hauls herself back up onto the trail and goes on.

Kaer Morhen is a great dark hulk of a castle, enormous and imposing. Zofia shrugs to herself; a castle is only stone, after all. She settles her sword at her hip and her pack on her back, and strides to the gates, and hammers on the heavy wood with a heavy hand.

The Witcher who opens the door inset into the gates is shaved bald, with pale skin and slitted amber eyes and a medallion about his throat that shows a coiled serpent, its fangs bared. He crosses his arms over his chest and looks her up and down, and frowns.

“Who are you, and why do you come to Kaer Morhen?” he demands.

“My name is Zofia,” Zofia replies, matching him stare for stare. “The White Wolf killed the man who slew my sister. I have come to swear my sword to him.”

The Witcher’s eyebrows arch. “That’s...new,” he says at last. “Well. Alright. Come in, then. I’m Auckes.”

Zofia offers him a hand, and Auckes, still looking startled, takes it in a firm clasp. He does not, as so many men do, try to squeeze her hand too tightly, to establish that he is the stronger between them - just as well, really, since though Zofia is perfectly capable of crushing a _human_ man’s hand in her own grip, a Witcher is far stronger than she will ever be. She’s a little surprised that a Witcher is so polite.

The White Wolf is...quite a man, Zofia decides when she meets him. His eyes are, in fact, golden; she’d thought that might be bardic exaggeration, but no, they’re the same color as molten gold. His hair is just as white as all the stories say, too. And he’s got an expression that might make a weaker woman faint, or weep, or flee.

Zofia stands her ground and meets his eyes. “You avenged my sister when you slew the king of Kaedwen,” she tells him. “I wish to swear my sword to you.”

The White Wolf considers her for a long, silent moment. At his side, the scarred Witcher who seems to be his second-in-command is looking thoughtful. At last, the White Wolf shrugs a little, and nods, and says, “I accept.”

Just that; but that is enough.

*

Auckes offers, a little awkwardly, that if she wants to, she can sit with him and his brothers at supper. Zofia agrees. The other Viper Witchers give her odd looks, but Zofia knows how to talk to warriors. She hasn’t been terribly talkative these last two years, admittedly, but it comes back easily enough. Rough jokes; comments on the food; comparing scars. Witchers, it seems, aren’t _that_ unlike mercenaries in their table chatter.

They’re not that much unlike mercenaries in their weapons practice, either, she learns the next morning. Faster and stronger and deadlier, yes; she expected that. But when she proves she knows how to use the curved sword she carries, can take a bruise or a fall and come back fast and fierce, can hassle her opponent about his technique even as he disarms her, the Witchers seem to decide that she’s...not _one_ of them, not yet, but an acceptable ally. Several of them take turns practicing with her, working at what must be barely half their normal speed, and Zofia resolves to get faster - she’ll never be Witcher-fast, but she can be faster than _this_.

The Witchers clearly think the hot springs beneath the keep will cause her confusion and distress; Zofia snorts at them and slides into a pool all her own, hot enough to loosen stiff muscles but _not_ one of the scalding ones they all seem to prefer. Most mercenaries are male; she’s used to being around large groups of naked men. She _is_ surprised by how few leers she gets, how rare the filthy comments are - how, when one redheaded Wolf Witcher makes a lewd suggestion about what her place among the Witchers _should_ be, the other Witchers around him reach out almost in unison to cuff him across the head, and the White Wolf looks over from his own pool, to which only his scarred second-in-command and grizzled advisor are welcome, and growls the redhead’s name in obvious disapproval that makes the man flinch and cower, then offers Zofia a short, oddly courteous nod.

The Viper Witchers make space for her at dinner, and Zofia sits beside Auckes and banters with the warriors surrounding them and does not flinch from slitted eyes or too-sharp teeth or the way many of them seem to prefer their meat on the rawer side of rare. She listens to their banter, and asks a few questions; and as the meal ends, she thanks the biggest of them, Letho, for his role in the death of the king of Kaedwen. It earns her a number of startled looks. What, did they not think she meant it, that the king’s death was her vengeance, and she is grateful for it?

No, she concludes over the next few weeks and months, as she trains and fights and eats and bathes beside her new allies. It’s just that none of them expect _any_ human to treat them with more than strained courtesy and whispered insults at best. That they are all used to being looked upon as monsters.

Zofia has seen monsters; Zofia lost her sister to one. Witchers, as far as she can tell, are only men - and often better men than most. Stronger, faster, skilled and talented in ways no normal man might be; but only men, when all is said and done.

*

The White Wolf doesn’t stop at Kaedwen. His Witchers go out into the world, hunting monsters, and sometimes they come back with stories of monsters that wear human forms, that call themselves lords and kings and noblemen, and then the White Wolf calls his army together and they march out to war.

Zofia has to admit she’s taken aback, the first time it happens, when the White Wolf stand up in front of his army and _tells_ them what monstrousness the lord they march against has committed. He lays it out in plain, harsh words, and the Witchers growl their fury in return - and Zofia growls with them.

She marches with them, too, in among the Viper Witchers, and she fights side-by-side with Auckes and Letho and Serrit, and if she is not so fast nor so sturdy as they are, still she holds her own. They clap her on the shoulder, after the first skirmish, call her ‘fierce Zofia’ and praise her technique in blunt, inelegant phrases, and Zofia cleans her sword and smiles as sharp and bright as any of them, and knows she’s been accepted.

The White Wolf takes Caingorn from a prince who failed to protect his people. He takes Ghelibol from a lord who tries to burn its elves; the top half of Aedirn from a king who thinks only of himself, and not his peasantry. Zofia raises her sword in the White Wolf’s service, and if she could not slay the king of Kaedwen, her blade kills monsters all the same.

She thinks she’ll follow the Wolf forever, for giving her that.

*

Zofia isn’t in love, the first time she fucks Auckes. She likes him well enough, as a friend and a comrade-in-arms; he’s got an entertainingly filthy sense of humor, he never treats her like a mascot or a fairweather friend the way some of the other Witchers do, and he trusts her to hold her own in battle. It’s more than half the mercenaries of her old troop could manage. And he’s handsome enough, in an angular sort of way. And by that point, Zofia hasn’t fucked anyone in nearly three years, and she’s fucking _horny_ , and she figures he’ll be better at it than, say, Letho, who is an unmitigated ass most of the time.

It’s a remarkably good fuck, if bitier than she expects.

He’s not an ass about it afterwards, either. Some men, you fuck them and then they think they _own_ you. She’s had to break some fingers, now and again, and once an arm, to convince men that just because they’ve shared her bed, doesn’t mean they’ve any rights to her outside it. But the way Auckes acts around her doesn’t change at all: they spar, they eat together, they jest, they banter, they go on with their lives.

So the next time she feels like a good fuck, she goes to him again. She doesn’t necessarily expect him to say yes; some people don’t like sharing their beds with the same person more than once, so as to keep _feelings_ out of the matter. But Auckes opens his door to her knock and gives her a mildly startled look, eyebrows high on his forehead, and when Zofia asks, “Want to fuck again?” he nods and opens the door wider and ushers her in.

Still good. Still bitey.

It starts to be a habit. Not every night - not even every other, or every third. But at least once a week, Zofia finds herself starting to think she wants a drink, and then reminds herself that she’s not _doing_ that anymore. That her days of drinking away Anna’s memory are gone, because Anna is avenged and Zofia is one of the White Wolf’s warriors, helping to slay the man-shaped monsters of the world, the ones who destroy girls like Anna, the ones who hide behind their crowns and their titles, the ones who had no predators until the White Wolf chose to take a stand.

On those nights, she goes and knocks on Auckes’ door, because a good fuck is just what she needs to get to sleep properly.

He’s surprisingly nice to sleep beside, too. He doesn’t kick or thrash in the night, his snoring is regular and not terribly loud, and he’s warm as a furnace, which is remarkably useful in the cold halls of Kaer Morhen.

About six months after their first fuck, Zofia finds herself lying awake one night wishing she could hear his snoring, and realizes she sleeps best in _his_ bed, with his warmth at her side. That she would like to be there, even if they don’t fuck. Even if it’s just to sleep, peacefully, in his company.

She’s never expected to find a man she wanted to _stay_ with, is the thing. When she went off to be a mercenary, she figured she’d be a mercenary until she died or got too wounded to go on, and if she lived long enough to retire, she’d go back to wherever Anna was living and offer to help out with Anna’s children, to cut wood and carry water and make herself useful in exchange for room and board and the pleasure of seeing her sister happy.

That dream died with Anna, and Zofia spent two years assuming she’d die in battle or drink herself to death, whichever came first.

But Anna is avenged, and Zofia has stopped trying to drink herself to death - though she could, easily enough, on the poison the Witchers call White Gull - and though she thinks the pain of Anna’s death will always be part of her, it’s...fading. Mending, scarring, like any of the other wounds that litter Zofia’s skin. She could cling to it - could reopen that wound, let herself keep bleeding out the way she was for two godsforsaken years…

But.

Anna would want her to be happy. Anna, who embroidered flowers along the hems of Zofia’s tunics, daisies and pansies and forget-me-nots, and grew her favorite herbs, and cooked her favorite meals. Anna, who smiled like the sunrise whenever Zofia came home.

Zofia gets up and pulls a heavy robe on, and goes padding through the cold halls to Auckes’ rooms. Auckes looks _very_ startled when he opens the door; it’s well past the midnight hour, much later than she’s ever come to him before.

Zofia kisses him.

They haven’t kissed before: Zofia’s always felt it would make their simple fucking seem to _mean_ too much. Would bring _feelings_ into it - feelings more complicated than ‘I’m horny, you’re attractive, let’s fuck.’ But here she is with her feelings, and here he is -

Kissing her back.

“Zofia,” he says, a little wonderingly, when she shoves him back into his rooms and kicks the door shut behind her.

“Auckes,” she says. “Mind if I spend the night?”

“My bed is yours,” Auckes says, almost carefully.

She sleeps like a log, tucked up against his more-than-human warmth.

In the morning she leans up on one elbow and looks down at him and asks, “Room for another weapons rack in here?”

Auckes looks up at her, slitted eyes wide, and says, “Sure. Got space for another clothes chest, too.”

Zofia moves her few possessions into his rooms that afternoon, and Auckes stands in the doorway and watches as she folds her clothing into the new chest at the foot of the bed.

She tucks the pouch of Anna’s hair carefully down into a corner of the chest. It’s safe here.

*

Kaer Morhen changes a lot over the next decade and a half. Zofia is frankly grateful when Jan arrives, a few years after she did, takes one long look at the chaos which a keep full of Witchers entails, and starts hiring servants. Witchers are good at a lot of things, but cooking and cleaning aren’t often among them. The food improves immeasurably when Marlene takes over the kitchen; the corridors lose their dust and cobwebs, and even the chinks in the stone are filled in, as Jan organizes his growing cadre of servants into a household which would do any monarch proud. The White Wolf brings home a daughter a few years after that, and Zofia finds herself being asked desperate questions about what an infant _needs_. It hurts to drag out the memories of Anna, tiny and helpless and _hers_ , but she does it, and it hurts less as time goes by, use and fondness helping those wounds begin to scar. The mages arrive a few years later still, and settle in, and cause chaos, and fix it again; the potions expert brews a concoction that makes the Trials less utterly brutal, and every Witcher in Kaer Morhen falls a little in love with her, and Zofia, who has spent years listening to the boys scream out their deaths, decides there’s at least _one_ sorceress worth keeping around. 

Other human warriors trickle in over the years. They’ve all got stories like Zofia’s: someone they lost, someone they couldn’t protect, couldn’t save from the monsters. Someone whose death has brought them to the White Wolf’s door, in the hopes that their swords can help slay _other_ monsters, save other men and women the same grief they feel. Some of them end up with Witcher lovers, others don’t. A few find Kaer Morhen far too strange, and leave again.

They figure out they're not _aging_ about eight years after Zofia first took Auckes for a lover; she _ought_ to be far further into her prime than she is, and instead she's almost growing _younger_. The humans discuss this amongst themselves, quietly, far from any Witchers, and agree to watch and see if there are any further side effects, and in the meantime, set wagers on which Witcher will be the first to notice - and when. Zofia finds herself laughing with her fellows, and realizes she's - she's fine with it, if she _is_ accidentally as immortal as Auckes is. If her death, from aught but violence alone, has been set far into the future. She will not be joining Anna quite yet.

Auckes is Zofia’s rock: steady, constant, unchanging as the stone. Filthy humor and friendly banter and an arm around her shoulders on their way down to the baths; sparring and sex and sleeping tucked against his inhuman warmth. The easy rhythm of his snores. Her sword beside his on the weapons rack; her clothes folded in the chest next to his at the foot of their bed.

She’s been his lover for a decade when she finally tells him about Anna. Beautiful Anna, with the sunlight in her hair. Sweet Anna, who was Zofia’s sister and daughter and the center of her world. Dead Anna, wrapped in rags, victim of a human monster’s lusts.

Auckes kisses her forehead and doesn’t say anything at all, but three weeks later he comes back from a hunt with a silver pendant. It looks like the Viper pendant she’s been wearing for a couple of years now, but with a secret: a tiny compartment built into the back, just large enough for a lock of golden hair.

*

Zofia barely notices when the bard first arrives, aside from the moment the White Wolf lays claim to him in front of the hall. She figures he’ll be one of the ones who can’t deal with the keep, the Witchers, the general chaos of life in Kaer Morhen, and goes back to her dinner and her long-running argument with Letho as to whether Toussainti wine or Lyrian mead is better. Letho likes Toussainti wine, the idiot; Lyrian mead is _far_ superior, in that it will get you much drunker _and_ result in less of a hangover.

She notices a little more when the bard starts playing for the whole hall. He’s _good_ , actually. She’s heard a fair number of bards over the years, and he’s head and shoulders above even the best of them. And he’s cheerful and friendly, and seems to be growing accustomed to Kaer Morhen; maybe he’ll actually end up sticking around.

She doesn’t really _talk_ to him until the month the Witchers spend dealing with the idiot king of Kovir. They’re some of the few people left in the keep - him because who brings a bard to a war, anyhow, and her because she went and broke her leg like an idiot the other week, and it’ll take a while to finish setting, even with the way she’s been healing a lot faster since she started fucking Auckes on the regular. It turns out he’s cheerful and friendly and absolutely _desperate_ to fuck the White Wolf, though he clearly thinks he’s hiding that pretty well. Eh, it’s not Zofia’s place to judge. Maybe the White Wolf _wants_ a pretty little bard in his bed. She tells him a few stories, enjoying the way he blushes and his eyes go big, and he sings a song for her at supper that night, and after that he smiles whenever he sees her and joins her in the baths when they happen to be there at the same time, and Zofia figures maybe they’re friends.

The Witchers return, and the bard beds the White Wolf and then _keeps_ bedding him, and all the Viper Witchers start complaining - though out of amusement rather than irritation - that the bard smells like lust all the time, very strongly, and Zofia snorts to herself and leans against Auckes at the supper table and gets into a filthy-joke contest with Letho and Serrit that lasts three weeks before she wins with a jest that causes half the Viper table to go into convulsions of shocked laughter.

The White Wolf goes to Redania to sign a treaty; the White Wolf comes back. Zofia has to admit she’d rather see every noble asshole in the North strung up on a gibbet, every murdering mealy-mouthed coward among them, but the White Wolf doesn’t like war, so the treaty will have to do.

A whole gaggle of noble idiots come to court the White Wolf, and Zofia laughs with the Vipers and mocks their chances: anyone with _eyes_ can see the Wolf is besotted with his bard. There’s no chance anyone else will win his heart, much less his hand.

She mostly ignores the noble idiots, their primping and preening and desperate attempts to catch the White Wolf’s eye. Mostly.

There’s one, though. One girl who isn’t quite like her companions, stuck-up and snooty and useless as they are. Who dances with _Lambert_ , of all Witchers, and laughs with the bard, and there’s something about her that catches Zofia’s attention. Her courage, maybe. Her smile.

She laughs like Anna did.

She’s nothing like Anna, really: dark-haired where Anna was as golden-blonde as midsummer. Dark eyes where Anna’s were blue as the sky. Slender and dainty, while Anna was bidding fair to grow into a woman shaped like a harvest goddess, tall and broad-hipped and full-bosomed and lush. Noble where Anna was as common as muck. But -

But she laughs like Anna did, sweet and easy. She smiles like Anna used to, so full of hope that the world will, against all odds, be kind. She dances with a sort of innocent joy, leaning into Lambert’s arms and staring adoringly up into his eyes, and Zofia blinks and sees Anna at the harvest festival, dancing with the miller’s son.

Zofia’s pretty sure she’s just - just missing her sister, is all. It’s been almost two decades since Anna died. The anniversary is coming up in a few months - not that Zofia knows the exact day, but still. She’s just getting maudlin. That’s all.

The noble idiots leave, but Milena de Roggeven stays, and Zofia, watching her from the Viper table, or in the baths, or during the dancing, sees courage and sweet nature and a deep capacity for love, and Milena’s really nothing like Anna at all except for how much she _is_.

Zofia holds out for almost a week before she actually _talks_ to the girl. If she talks to her, she’ll see how much she _isn’t_ Anna, after all, and that - that’s a pain she isn’t quite ready for. But the girl is alone here, and if - if Anna had ever come to a place like this, Zofia would have wanted someone to be kind to _her_. So she calls the girl over, as they’re leaving the baths, and shows her the private pool and its supplies, and offers her as much advice as Zofia’s gathered over the last decade and a half, about Witchers and about living in Kaer Morhen.

And Milena offers to embroider Zofia’s tunics in exchange.

Zofia keeps her composure, if by a bare thread. She brings Milena a handful of her best tunics, and lets the girl choose what to decorate them with.

She gets them back with flowers along the hems, bright and cheerful: daisies, and pansies, and forget-me-nots.

It’s probably a coincidence. It _has_ to be a coincidence. Zofia’s never heard of - of souls _returning_ , not like this, not unless they come back as noonwraiths or rusalki or other deadly things. Zofia _knows_ it’s a coincidence, that Anna is dead, that flowers are a common enough decoration.

She’s certainly never going to tell Milena about Anna, about sunlit hair and gentle hands and flowers, about the girl who died before Milena was ever born. Like as not, a noble girl wouldn’t care to have a peasant mercenary hanging about her all the time anyhow. But -

Milena de Roggeven has an older sister with a heart like a cold stone. _Marta_ de Roggeven does not know what a treasure she has cast away. Zofia - Zofia will look out for Milena.

Just as a sister should.

And somehow, now, when she touches the pendant about her throat that holds golden hair safe in a silver case, when she thinks of Anna - it’s Anna as she _was_ that she remembers: Anna smiling, Anna laughing, Anna _alive_. The memory of Anna’s ragged corpse fades, grows weak and dim, and Zofia remembers her sister in the full flower of her youth and beauty, joyful and beautiful and sweet as honey.

Anna, she thinks, would be glad to know that Zofia has found this: a lord she can follow with her whole heart; a lover she can trust; a home she can defend. And a sister, not of blood perhaps, but of the soul.

**Author's Note:**

> I am working on more in this AU! Please feel free to come throw questions or suggestions at me on tumblr or discord. And thank you all so, so much for your kindness & support; I can't tell you how much it means to me.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Stamped in the Mint of Memory](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24385009) by [AceOfTigers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AceOfTigers/pseuds/AceOfTigers)




End file.
